Review of Jojo Rabbit (2019) by Timsu — 16 Jan 2020

The humor of the movie would have been fine as a 5-minute SNL skit, but it does not add anything to a 2 hour movie. Instead, the result is jarring. It took me 15 minutes to realise that this was actually set in (an absurdist version of) Nazi Germany, rather than in a modern-day English speaking country. I first thought that we were seeing a small community of neo-nazis, portrayed as pathetic by showing how they put on fake German accents (that seem to switch on and off during the movie) and go to a Nazi-themed summer camp. I struggled the whole movie with that frame, not helped by the fact that while I love absurd humor I could find nothing to appreciate beyond 'haha Nazi's but ridiculous'. Just being irreverent towards Hitler and the Nazi's is not shocking or original enough anymore to carry a joke on its own. The components of the movie itself are decent in principle and when I read about the movie beforehand it felt promising (absurd setting centered on Nazis; irreverent coming of age story of fanatical boy realising that those he has learned to hate are also human; the idiotic behaviour extremism can lead people to do), but do not work together, at least not in this movie. The movie seems to pretend it is edgy or breaks new ground with all these elements, but it is not: all of it has been done, and much better. Meanwhile, genocide is reduced to how some movies treat the misogynist uncle: we know it's kindoff bad, but isn't he just a loveable package? Most Nazis don't really mean it anyway. And while this can be the case for many characters in a Nazi movie, the movie makes no attempt to reflect on why they do such terrible things then or how the system still produces such results (or what these results are anyway - it shows and tells about some attrocities that we as an audience are supposed to take as an indication that bad things do happen, but they are so out of proportion with reality that it seems to trivialise that reality).

For all the pretense in what is written about this movie elsewhere, don't waste your time watching it. The humour fails and there is only a veneer of a message or critical take that falls apart at first scrutiny.